::Arc Poetry::Log Entries::Two parts joy, one part torture::

“In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them.”
—Ted Hughes, from the essay “Capturing Animals,” Poetry in the Making

Editor’s Note

Last winter I sat on a literary grant jury. I spent the months of January and February reading 157 50-page excerpts from manuscripts-in-progress in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young adult fiction. The manuscripts were sent to me without their authors’ names. In principal, I was impressed by this system, which aims to judge work purely on merit, thereby avoiding bias related to track records, reputations, histories with jurors, and so on. Nor was I new to blind reading: Being part of the Arc crew means spending part of each summer reading nameless entries to our Poem of the Year contest (the results of which appear in this issue). But eight weeks immersed in work written by unknown hands proved unsettling. The growing sensation, each time I grabbed a new manuscript from the seemingly bottomless box on the floor of my office, was of pawing through darkness. While at first I found it exciting, I increasingly longed for something to see or to hold. The contours in the letters of a name. Real people to whom to attach these homeless words.

Here at Arc, we pride ourselves on what we hope is our openness to work written by anyone, previously heard of or not, published or not, lauded or not. We strive to disregard a poet’s “name” while assessing his or her poems. In this light, my reaction to the grant applications gave me pause, for I realized how much, by nature or instinct or learning—or all of the above—I rely on what I know of an author to ground my reading. I realized, too, that one of the things I love about reading is the relationship one builds—privately, amid lamps and shadows and bookshelves—with one’s favourite authors. The habit, for me, reaches far back into childhood, when I methodically made my way through the entire oeuvre of Dr. Seuss available at the Appleby Branch of the Burlington Public Library before venturing on to other authors, such as L.M. Montgomery. In Montgomery’s case, my unabashed love of Anne of Green Gables allowed me to forgive failings in its sequels. For the benefits I accrue by returning to certain authors like old friends, in effect going home, this is a trade-off I’m willing to make. If the alchemy that takes place during an act of reading is pinned in that space between the mind and the page—where reader, writer and imagination meet—is this a problem? Is there any such thing as pure objective judgment of a literary work anyway?

Now there’s a question we thought worth passing on to our readers—in, quite literally, a hands-on fashion. Thus, there is something missing in this issue of Arc. I should say, something will appear to be missing when you flip to the poetry. You will of course find lines and stanzas. You’ll find verb, metaphor, enjambment and variations on metre. What you won’t find is any evidence of the poets responsible for these compositions, save the words they have pieced together. Atop each poem, in the space usually reserved for the author’s name, we offer only white space.

Welcome to Arc’s first-ever homage to Anon. Each of the poems in this issue—including our contest winners and runners up—offers readers an opportunity to encounter a poem devoid of the context offered, for better or worse, by the name of whoever held the pen that wrote it. As Aislinn Hunter writes in one of three pieces that explore works by Anon in this issue, reading verse sans creator can be liberating: “Anon is genderless, ageless, timeless and sometimes without country. I read poems by Anon and enjoy the sensation that comes from the way the poem is forced to stand as athing- in-itself, like a present left for you in a quiet room, all trace of the giver gone…” Such is the ultimate condition of the poem, according to Amanda Jernigan, who writes in her appreciation of the old English poem, “The Bookworm Riddle,” that “all poems aspire to the condition of anonymity.” That is, they strive to live beyond the confines of their makers’ lives and selves.

Asa Boxer reminds us in “The ego of the poet” that literature involves a long history of collaborative reworking: “Homer, remember, is not the work of a single author, but that of generations, as is the Old Testament, as are folk-tales and folksongs. The greater part of our literary heritage has been the product of many hands.” As such, the notion of a single creator—and the attendant critical attention placed upon the skill, potential and reputation of that creator—can be seen as a relatively recent complication in the life of the average poet. Maybe this is why Don Domanski stresses poetry’s ability to see past the ego of both the poet and the reader in his essay, “Poetry and the sacred,” asserting that “the sanctum sanctorum cannot be reached with your name intact. The poem as it is written down must precede you, not the other way around.”

The use of Anon as a byline has not always—or, necessarily, ever—been attached to purity of purpose or erasure of ego. In his book Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, published in the UK this year by Faber, John Mullan writes about Anon’s historic value as protection against censure—especially for women or politically bold authors—and even as a vehicle of promotion. Swift and Pope, for example, understood the marketing value of mystery, and cultivated their own anonymity to stir curiosity and speculation. The reason this worked is simple: people want, by nature, to place a thing made. We are wired for context, and that joy in Anon that Hunter expresses is in part a basic joy in the life of the imagination: the invisible author is free to be created in one’s mind. Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in her poem “The Garden of Thieves,” that the “Great Poem,” “the one we all know / Never gets written” was in fact “written by Anonymous who was my favourite poet / And who I thought was a Byzantine king.”

Maybe reading work by known versus unknown writers is simply the difference between that intense conversation over coffee with an old friend—complete with the undercurrent of shared histories, ancient shorthand and inside jokes—and that unexpected, riveting, enlightening discussion at the party with a stranger. Both etch into the self. Both claim their space.

The je ne sais quoi of Anon undeniably charms. We are poets and readers, after all: we must admit our romantic strain. But Anon is also a tease, a nagging question.

Luckily for you, at least within the parameters of our experiment, relief exists. Our contributors’ section at the back of the magazine is arranged as an index of poem titles. When the need to know becomes too great, when the suspense would seem to be killing you, we bring succour: in the form of answers, a mere few page-flips away.

For how long will you resist?

‘Poem of the Year’: according to us, according to you

With Arc’s 13th annual Poem of the Year contest, we bring a whole new twist to the competition: our new Readers’ Choice Award. To bestow this honour, we posted the top 50 entries to the contest on our website and invited Arc readers to join us in the experience of blind reading and judging. To our great delight, more than 300 people took up the challenge. The poem they selected, you’ll note—as did we—did not place in the “official” contest’s top three, nor did it garner an honourable mention. I leave to each his own analysis of these results. The Readers’ Choice, which you might say was “piloted” this year, proved so popular that we will definitely carry it forward to 2009, with the system tweaked a little further to discourage and prevent the minimal amount of voter abuse that was detected. [Note bene: The winning Poem of the Year was not among those eligible for Readers’ Choice. As it happens, the author of that poem chose not to grant permission to post the work online. So a straight comparison between winning poems, as chosen by Arc editors versus Arc readers—one I’d wager we’d all be keen to ponder—is unfortunately not possible this year.]

Ranters and ravers

Three new features appear in this issue which we hope will become familiar friends to our readers. First, the Arc Mailbag. While we have occasionally over the years received direct response to what we print in our pages, we are now actively encouraging such correspondence. If something in Arc strikes you, maddens you, changes you, write us and tell us why. Don’t hold back. If you have a bone to pick with a
poet or critic, go for it: pick it clean. Second, we inaugurate Arc Dozens, a list of current fave collections selected by a poet-about-town. Our poetry editor Rob Winger gets us going. Flip right to the back of the magazine to learn his reading secrets (and that he’s not so great at math). Next issue, another poet’s list will see print. Call it virtual snooping on the bookshelves of the nation’s bards. Third, the Arc Rave. We noticed, despite their generally healthy crankiness, that every now and then our reviewers are genuinely impressed by what they read, and come at us with an enthusiastic endorsement of a book. Such a response will now be designated in the Brief Reviews section as an Arc Rave. I can’t promise there’ll be one in every issue—we don’t intend to go around forcing boosterism—but, surprisingly, you’ll find more than one on this go-around.

⁰ Arc 61, Winter 2009
Arc 61, The Anonymous Issue, a.k.a Headless : Table of Contents | Contributors